Have added those little orange icons all over the place to remind people that XML feeds are a useful way to keep up to date… but I’ve decided I have one little problem with the whole feed concept.
When Dave Winer invented RSS way back when, he probably thought it marked the end of the accursed mailing list, with all its spam-related issues. Over time the rest of us came to assume the same, but there is still an awkward gap which is not comfortably met by either solution, and that is the need for temporary feeds.
Most blogging software allows for per-entry feeds, which means you can subscribe to an entry to follow comments for that thread. The thing is, I never subscribe to these, because I don’t want to have to think about where to put the feed in my aggregator (Bloglines), and I sure as hell don’t want my personal blogroll getting bloated by a bunch of links to individual entries.
What I want is a clicky-click way to subscribe to an entry (eg I may have left a comment somewhere and want to be notified of replies) and have it either
a) Automatically removed from my aggregator after x days, or
b) Automatically removed from my aggregator after a period of inactivity of x days.
I would not want it to show up in my regular feed list, or require categorization. I also would not want to be notified when my subscription is removed, since it’s just not that important.
What would be ideal is if there was a tag in the feed which indicated whether this subscription should be temporary, and the condition of the expiry. I can’t see anything that meets this requirement in either the Atom or the RSS specifications [Please correct me if I have overlooked something].
Even without such a tag, aggregators could support this as an option when subscribing. If Bloglines offered this I would subscribe to individual entries all the time. But as it is I rarely see replies to my comments on other blogs because I simply forget to return.
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Update: CoComment attempts to solve this problem of tracking conversations, but does it in a pretty intrusive way, by inserting extra code into the page (when you click a bookmarklet). If you forget to click the bookmarklet, your conversation will not be tracked, although Firefox users can install an extension which handles it all automatically.
It also relies on a consistency of form field names, which means that it fails on this site (because of my super secret very effective anti spam bot solution). And the buttons it adds look pretty tacky are likely to clash with the style of the site you are viewing.